3M Sticks With Continuant as Its Single Point of Contact for Communications Services

Headquarters:

Maplewood, MN

Industry:

Manufacturing

Countries:

70+

Employees:

~ 95,000

Revenue:

$ 35b+

Background Challenge/Solution Outlook Next Steps

The background

Founded in 1902 as a mining outfit, 3M has become a household name and global leader in manufacturing—producing over 60,000 products, across multiple brands, for wide-ranging industries.

As a global titan of industry, 3M is one of the thirty blue chip stocks that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). Organizations included on the DJIA list must be headquartered in the U.S., have an excellent reputation in the marketplace, and demonstrate sustained growth.

The growth displayed by 3M over the past 120 years is the stuff of legend.

They’ve worked tirelessly to make their brand and products sticky to consumers across the globe. But, a brand with 3M’s type of staying power and hypergrowth on the global stage (they have over 100 locations in more than 70 countries) has to have the kind of technology and IT architecture that can hyperscale along with it.

In fact, it can be argued that over the past 50 years these very IT systems have been the great enablers of sustained and accelerated growth for 3M.

The solution

Searching for such a solution led the company to Continuant in 2004. Able to provide on-site and remote support for all systems from each of the three vendors, Continuant became 3M’s trusted communication partner. 3M can rely on Continuant to save them time, money, and energy by being its single point of contact, regardless of location.

The challenge

To communicate between 3M’s 146 different locations across the world, it used systems from a variety of different vendors, from Avaya, to Siemens, and Nortel. This meant it had at least three different points of contact to deal with, which made getting support for systems far more difficult than it should have been. What 3M needed was a single point of contact that could lessen the hassle and the cost that came from managing a system like this.

The outlook

3M and Continuant’s relationship has persisted to this day. As 3M moves away from its legacy systems, Continuant continues to lend a hand in moving the company toward a cloud-based solution. This is certainly no small feat, but with two innovators working together, it’s sure to be accomplished in the years to come.

Let’s develop a powerful business case for bringing Continuant to your organization.